New review of For a Liberatory Politics of Home in Housing Studies, by Lindsey McCarthy

I am grateful to Lindsey McCarthy for her generous reading of my Duke University Press book.

“For a Liberatory Politics of Home refuses easy answers, but opens up new and necessary directions for thought and action. I imagine it will be remembered as a seminal contribution in housing and urban scholarship – one that future scholars will return to when trying to think differently about the politics of space, care, and belonging.”

Her review is up now on Housing Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2025.2499635

The book and further reviews are available on Duke’s site: https://www.dukeupress.edu/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home

McFarlane, Amin, Brickell, McElRoy and Saxena review For a Liberatory Politics of Home in Urban Studies

I am deeply thankful to Urban Studies (and Michele Acuto) for the review forum they organised around my For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press).

The forum comprises interventions by Colin McFarlane, Ash Amin, Katherine Brickell, Erin McElroy, Saanchi Saxena, and my closing reflection.

Freely available at: https://www.urbanstudiesonline.com/review/book-review-forum-for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home/


Excerpts:

Colin McFarlane: “Michele Lancione’s For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a rare and remarkable piece of scholarship. It breaks new ground and will likely make a lasting impact in Geography and Urban Studies. It does what all great books do: inspires new kinds of thinking, and does so by mobilising a deceptively straightforward argument, the kind of argument that when you read it the topic in question seems to have shifted on its axis.”

Ash Amin: “I cannot think of another book that offers such a profound reformulation of home-lessness, and it does so with breathtaking mastery of critical theory, the political economy and biopolitics of capitalist dispossession and expulsion, and evidence from around the West of what the machinery of home and homelessness produces on the ground.”

Katherine Brickell: “For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a monograph which is extremely rare – to stunning effect Michele combines the conceptual, empirical, personal, practical, philosophical and political […] It turns homeless studies on their head by shattering the oppositional frames of home and homelessness and centring an anti-capitalist critique of housing. The feminist-routing of the book also weaves through its pages, including the author’s critical and self-reflexive discussions of his own place in geography, and indeed academia more broadly.”

Erin McElroy: “[T]here is something hauntological about the way in which housing gets troubled throughout the book, for instance in Lancione’s exploration of the extractive spectres of Italian Catholic patriarchal fascism which creep into Italy’s housing present. […] It is not ‘the housing question’ as much as ‘the question of housing’ that he argues we need to further interrogate. […] What does it mean then, to move beyond inhabitation, or to radically inhabit housing? Attempting to guide readers in exploring this question, Lancione opens up space to theorise a housing future yet to come.”

Saanchi Saxena: “[A] brilliant, thought-provoking contribution to the fields of urban studies and critical geography. Where the book shines is in its proposal of a radical epistemology that breaks the dichotomy of home and homelessness, reads those occupying the sites of homelessness as performing their own politics of inhabitation, advocates for a structural overhaul of the way we think of housing and housing interventions, and on a broader scale, prompts us to rethink our understanding of urban inhabitation.”

A review of For a Liberatory Politics of Home in Antipode, by Samantha Thompson

I am grateful to Samantha Thompson for her insightful review of my book For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke, 2023) out now in Antipode.

In closing her review, Samantha writes:

“For a Liberatory Politics of Home illuminates the necessity of intimate and collective thinking when writing about housing in order to reckon with the violence of housing systems and imagining, and fighting for, radical and just housing futures. The book itself embodies this approach: throughout each chapter, Lancione engages intentionally and deeply with those he is thinking with, enacting collectivity in citational practice. For a Liberatory Politics of Home offers gentle guidance and care as we wrestle with questions that are difficult and can cause us to wonder if the housing futures that we dream of are indeed possible. I suspect that for me and many others, this monograph will become a consistent bookshelf companion that we return to time and time again.”

You can read the full piece here: https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Book-review_Thompson-on-Lancione.pdf

In Melbourne: research workshop, book talk & seminar

I am happy to be in #Melbourne for a number of things, thanks to the wonderful Alison Young – Deputy Director of the Melbourne Centre for Cities.

On Wednesday, I will be in a full-day workshop to celebrate and discuss Alison’s latest research project on Spatial Justice & the City. Many critical housing and urban scholars will be there, and I look forward to the conversation.

On Thursday morning, I will give a seminar for ECR researchers, and in the afternoon, I will present For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press) at the Melbourne School of Design. The talk will be online too. Details: https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/events/informal/politics-of-home-homelessness

Thanks, Alison & colleagues, for having me here.

For a liberatory politics of home – in conversation with Mezzadra, Governa, Grazioli, Aru (5th April) (ITA)

Venerdì 5 aprile, 3pm, al DIST avremo un confronto sul mio ultimo libro For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press, 2023). Ci saranno Sandro Mezzadra, Margherita Grazioli, Francesca Governa e Silvia Aru.

Siete tutt* invitat* in Sala Vigliano. Allego il poster con preghiera di diffusione anche a dottorand* e post-doc interessat* a geografie della casa e dell’abitare.

Per seguire online bisogna registrarsi a questo link: https://polito-it.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pd-qpqz4vH9fcvrbnTg2394XX7dKQ2ssn

L’incontro sarà in lingua italiana.

Book launch: For a Liberatory Politics of Home at the UI, Sheffield (video recording)

The Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK, hosted a hybrid event to launch my new book ‘For a Liberatory Politics of Home‘ published by Duke University Press

The event took place on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. I introduced the book, followed by Professor Vanesa Castán Broto’s response at the Urban Institute. The recording of the seminar is available at the UI page, below and on our YouTube channel at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m8pUyxzM6I&t=31s

In the book, I question accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, the book attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, the book provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.

I thank the Urban Institute for making the registration of this book launch available to me and the Lab.

Book launches in Sheffield and London, 12th and 13th March

Next week I will present my book, For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press), with colleagues and friends in Sheffield & London.

12th March 4pm GMT, at the Urban Institute in Sheffield. The event will be in person & online. Register at 👉 https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/urban-institute/news/book-launch-liberatory-politics-home-michele-lancione

13th March 4pm GMT, at Kings College, Department of Geography, in-person only.

Thanks to Beth Perry and Katherine Brickell for organising!

For a Liberatory Politics of Home | Out now with Duke University Press

After many years of work, For a Liberatory Politics of Home is now officially out at Duke University Press.

Can we imagine a ‘home’ that does not require the constitution & colonization of an alterity to stand?

In violent times, a text to question violent binaries, looking for a language of radical affirmations.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home

Thanks to Ananya and Raquel for the generous endorsements.

“Michele Lancione has given us a tremendous gift with this pathbreaking and brilliant book. His arguments will be of immense meaning for social movements concerned with housing justice, many of which are grappling with regimes of property and the affective politics of home. The study of housing and homelessness will not be the same.” — Ananya Roy, author of Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development

“By mobilizing a new methodological, conceptual, and political grammar in which home and homelessness are not opposite but coherent expressions of a wider function of patriarchal and racialized processes of expulsions and extractions, this book offers a whole new perspective to imagine housing futures toward housing justice in which ‘housing precarity’ is not only a site for deprivation and relegation or a ‘problem to be fixed’ but can also perform a new politics of inhabitation.” — Raquel Rolnik, author of Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance

And thanks, among many, to Courtney Berger at Duke for helping, Katherine Brickell for the close reading, Kiera Chapman for the boost, the Urban Institute and the Beyond Inhabitation Lab for nurturing, ERC Research for supporting, Colin McFarlane for cheering and supporting, AbdouMaliq Simone & Eleonora Leo Mignoli for inhabiting it with me.

Avanti!

Proofs of my forthcoming book with Duke – For a Liberatory Politics of Home – out Nov 23

I am now concluding the editing of the proofs of my forthcoming book, For a Liberatory Politics of Home, out with Duke University Press in November 2023.

I worked on this text on and off for more than ten years, from my Ph.D. to a number of other entanglements. In the book, I develop an argument around the impossible possibility of ‘home’ and the colonies of the homely, in order to construct a way of thinking beyond the violent epistemic and material entrapments of the binary home/homelessness. I work with processual, feminist, and autonomous thinking, and I ground the argument in my Italian ethnographic research but also in years of engagement with debates and struggles around housing justice across the Atlantic.

If you want to know more, a preliminary page is available here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home

The book will be out in November 2023. I am extremely grateful to the people at Duke for their incredible editorial steer and dedication, to Ananya Roy and Katheryne Brickell for unparalleled insights, to my brother AbdouMaliq Simone and to Leo for pushing me to write this thing, and to many others, whom I thank in the volume itself.